[Oz-envirolink] Monbiot: date for peak oil, and it's not reassuring.

[hugh spencer]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21490.htm



At Last, A  Date

For the first time, the International Energy  Agency has produced a date
for peak oil. And it’s not  reassuring.

By George Monbiot

December 18,  2008 "The Guardian" -- 15th December 2008 -- Can you  think
of a major threat for which the British government does not prepare? It
employs an army of civil servants, spooks and consultants to assess the
chances  of terrorist attacks, financial collapse, floods, epidemics, even
asteroid  strikes, and to work out what it should do if they happen. But
there is one  hazard about which it appears intensely relaxed. It has never
conducted its own  assessment of the state of global oil supplies and the
possibility that one day  they might peak and then go into decline.

If you ask, it always produces  the same response: - global oil resources
are adequate for the foreseeable  future.

(1) It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the
International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In
the  2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government's view.
World oil  resources,- it states, -are judged to be sufficient to meet the
projected growth  in demand to 2030 3(2); though it says nothing about what
happens at that point,  or whether they will continue to be sufficient
after 2030. But this, as far as  Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the
matter. Like most of the rich world's  governments, the United Kingdom
treats the IEA's projections as gospel. Earlier  this year, I submitted a
Freedom of Information request to the UK's Department  for Business, asking
what contingency plans the government has made for global  supplies of oil
peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: "the Government does  not feel
the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of
crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020."(3)

So the IEA had  better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil
commissioned by the US  Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert
L.Hirsch concluded that "without  timely mitigation, the economic, social
and political costs - of world oil  supplies peaking - will be
unprecedented."(4) He went on to explain what "timely  mitigation" meant.
Even a worldwide emergency response -10 years before world  oil peaking-,
he wrote, would leave "a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade  after the
time that oil would have peaked."(5) To avoid global economic  collapse, we
need to begin "a mitigation crash program 20 years before  peaking."(6) If
Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in  deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA  radically
changed its assessment. Until this year's report, the agency mocked  people
who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it
published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those
who  warned of this event as "doomsayers". "The IEA has long maintained
that none of  this is a cause for concern," he wrote. "Hydrocarbon
resources around the world  are abundant and will easily fuel the world
through its transition to a  sustainable energy future."(7) In its 2007
World Energy Outlook, the IEA  predicted a rate of decline in output from
the world's existing oilfields of  3.7% a year(8). This, it said, presented
a short-term challenge, with the  possibility of a temporary supply crunch
in 2015, but with sufficient investment  any shortfall could be covered.
But the new report, published last month,  carried a very different
message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which  means a much greater
gap to fill(9).

More importantly, in the 2008 report  the IEA suggests for the first time
that world petroleum supplies might hit the  buffers. "Although global oil
production in total is not expected to peak before  2030, production of
conventional oil 
 is projected to level off towards the end  of the
projection period."(10) These bland words reveal a major shift. Never
before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or
plateauing  of the world's conventional oil production (which is what we
mean when we talk  about peak oil).

But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or  doesn't it mean
that we have time to prepare? What does "towards the end of the  projection
period" mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast -
until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief
economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the
pants off  anyone who understands the implications.

Fatih Birol, the lead author of  the new energy outlook, is a small,
shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows.
He explained to me that the agency's new  projections were based on a major
study it had undertaken into decline rates in  the world's 800 largest oil
fields. So what were its previous figures based on?  "It was mainly an
assumption, a global assumption about the world's oil fields.  This year,
we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also
onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an
assumption, and this year it's a finding of our study." I told him that it
seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn't done this work before, but
had  based its assessment on educated guesswork. "In fact nobody had done
this  research," he told me. "This is the first publicly available
data".(11)

So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7%  in 2007,
when there was no proper research supporting it? "No, our previous  decline
assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best
of our knowledge - and we also said that the declines [could be] higher
than  what we have assumed."

Then I asked him a question for which I didn't  expect a straight answer:
could he give me a precise date by which he expects  conventional oil
supplies to stop growing?

"In terms of non-OPEC  [countries outside the big oil producers’ cartel]",
he replied, "we are  expecting that in three, four years' time the
production of conventional oil  will come to a plateau, and start to
decline. - In terms of the global picture,  assuming that OPEC will invest
in a timely manner, global conventional oil can  still continue, but we
still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau  as well, which is
of course not good news from a global oil supply point of  view."

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr  Birol's
date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch  report
is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a "global
energy revolution" to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the
environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as
the  Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and
Hirsch  suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and
infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me "I
think  time is not on our side here."

When I pressed him on the shift in the  agency's position, he argued that
the IEA has been saying something like this  all along. "We said in the
past that one day we will run out of oil. We never  said that we will have
hundreds of years of oil - but what we have said is that  this year,
compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are
significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we
are on  an unsustainable energy path has not changed".

This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between
a decline rate of 3.7%  and a rate of 6.7%. There is an even bigger
difference between suggesting that  the world is following an unsustainable
energy path – a statement almost  everyone can subscribe to, and revealing
that conventional oil supplies are  likely to plateau around 2020. If this
is what the IEA meant in the past, it  wasn't expressing itself very
clearly.

So what do we do? We could take to  the hills, or we could hope and pray
that Hirsch is wrong about the 20-year lead  time, and begin a global crash
programme today of fuel efficiency and  electrification. In either case,
the British government had better start drawing  up some contingency plans.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.  Eg DECC Press Office, 28th October 2008. Statement emailed to Duncan
Clark at  the Guardian.

2. International Energy Agency, 2007. World Energy Outlook  2007, page 43.
IEA, Paris.

3. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI  request, Ref 08/0091.

4. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert  Wendling, February 2005.
Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation,  & Risk Management.
US Department of Energy, page 4.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

5.  ibid, page 59.

6. ibid, page 65.

7. International Energy Agency,  2005. Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas
Technologies for the Energy Markets of  the Future, page 3. IEA, Paris.

8. International Energy Agency, 2007,  ibid, page 84.

9. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook  2008, page 43.
IEA, Paris.

10. ibid, p103.

11. This interview is  broadcast on the Guardian's website .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/15/fatih-birol-george-monbi
ot